We are biologically programmed to distrust free trade

Britain has become unprecedentedly dependent on imported food. According to the NFU, we supply only 59 per cent of our domestic market. Does that statistic worry you? If Twitter is anything to go by, it worries a great many people, including some who think of themselves as free marketeers: my old mate Roger Helmer, for example.

So what is it that bothers them? I mean, we don’t fret about food dependency at a sub-national level. Brighton, where I’ve lived for the past 15 years, is nowhere near being self-sufficient in food; nor in cars, gas, coal, steel, textiles or pretty much anything else needed to sustain a basic living standard. Yet that doesn’t seem to alarm anyone.

Though there are no oil-rigs off Brighton Pier, nor grain silos by the Theatre Royal, the town is wealthy beyond the dreams of the men who built those attractions. How did this wonder occur? My handsome, louche home city, in common with the rest of the country, became better off as a result of specialisation. It concentrated on the things it could do well – offering language courses to foreigners, boutiques to day-trippers, conference facilities, hotels and so on – and bought what it needed.

All human progress can be understood in terms of comparative advantage. In the Old Stone Age, we approached the Green ideal, eating locally and seasonally, reusing and recycling, importing almost nothing. In consequence, few of us lived beyond our early thirties, and women took a life-or-death risk every time they became pregnant.

Then, a miracle occurred: our remote ancestors stumbled upon specialisation. Ug is especially skilled at making spears and axe-heads. Instead of each member of the tribe making his own weapons, why not let Ug stay behind and make supplies for everyone while the rest hunt the mammoth, and give him a share of the meat? Specialisation leads to trade: Ug’s axe-heads are so good that we can exchange them with the neighbouring tribe for Og’s bowls, which are better than any we make ourselves. Thus began the process that has lifted humanity to its present peak, though it accelerated meaningfully only in the past three centuries. (This second miracle took place in Britain, and is the subject of my forthcoming book, Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World, to be published in November).

Brighton, of course, is not an independent country. But plenty of city-states have become fabulously rich through specialisation. Compare Hong Kong or Singapore, peopled by financiers rather than farmers, to North Korea, which takes import-substitution furthest, and where almost the entire population is conscripted at harvest-time. Where would you rather live?

Let’s ask the question again: why does reliance on imported food worry people? The answer has to do with how our minds are designed. In evolutionary terms, a few hundred years of commerce make no dent in millions of years of precarious foraging. The instinct to provide against famine, to hoard food, is embedded in our genome. Free trade is, literally, counter-intuitive.

No one is irrational in his own eyes, of course. We reach a conclusion for reasons that have to do with biology, and then explain it to ourselves in apparently logical terms. As Jonathan Haidt puts it, our intuitive elephant leans one way or the other, and then its rider (our conscious thought) rushes to justify that lean with what seem like reasons.

Food security is a good example. The idea that our food is coming from somewhere else just feels alarming. Never mind that that ‘somewhere else’ is defined by an invisible boundary, a line that exists only on maps. Never mind that Britain hasn’t been anywhere near self-sufficient in food since the nineteenth century. Our elephant is raising her trunk in distress, and her mahout is scampering about trying to rationalise that distress.

Roger gives several examples of that rationalisation. Farmers look after the land for us! Food security would help tackle our balance of payments problem! The more food we grow, the more tax revenue the Treasury will get! And what if there was a war, eh, eh?

I don’t mean to pick on Roger, who is a clever man, a patriot and a friend of fifteen years’ standing. The reason I am quoting him is that his response shows quite how powerfully an elephant can pull away from even the most skilled mahout. For Roger is not just a free trader – indeed, a libertarian. He is also a maths graduate and a committed Darwinian who likes to keep up with what I think of as the Danny Finkelstein corpus: all those studies on evolutionary biology and behavioural psychology by people like Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and Steven Pinker. I’d be surprised if he isn’t familiar with Haidt’s elephant metaphor.

Yet Roger, like so many small-c conservatives, is none the less pulled by his pachyderm. And the reason is clear enough. Free trade seems unnatural on several levels. Our minds are designed to make a category distinction between things we can see and touch, and things we can’t. The fact that Britain is better at exporting services than goods gives us an irrational sense that we’re somehow failing to pay our way. How can, say, insurance, or legal arbitration, pay for something as tangible as a combine harvester? (We ‘rely’ on the import of those, too.) For many people – though not Roger – free trade also violates an innate sense of equity: one party is surely getting a better deal than the other, which is ‘unfair’. Above all, the principle of comparative advantage – the idea that it would benefit us to trade freely with China even if, for the sake of argument, the Chinese were, in absolute terms, better at making everything than we were – seems incredible. Paul Samuelson called it the only idea in economics that is both surprising and true. However often it is explained – and nearly 200 years have passed since David Ricardo first adumbrated it – people continue to disbelieve it.

All the objections can be met. There is no intrinsic problem with having a balance of payments gap, and even if there were, misallocating resources to agriculture would widen rather than narrowing it. The same applies to tax revenue. The case for rural stewardship is unrelated to the arguments over the quantity of food grown: if you want to pay people to keep the countryside looking pretty – or, to put it differently, compensate them for the planning restrictions that prevent them turning their own land into housing estates or golf courses – about the least efficient way of doing so is by increasing agricultural output. Services and goods are complementary: a combine harvester is useless without someone to drive it. Trade, by definition, benefits both parties – otherwise it would not be trade but extortion. In the unlikely event that we were again besieged by U-boats, we would do what we did during the two world wars, converting land to agricultural use, growing potatoes in our gardens and also, no doubt, reopening unprofitable coalmines. As for Ricardian comparative advantage, it is explained here.

Don’t imagine, though, that the argument will ever be won. It looked as though it had been settled in the 1840s with the repeal of the Corn Laws, hugely to Britain’s benefit. It had to be settled all over again at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the Conservative Party divided over Imperial Preference. A version of the same argument was conducted when we ruinously accepted the EEC’s Common External Tariff in 1973.

Protectionism will always have its defenders: trade union shop stewards, church-going ladies convinced that trade is harming Africa, Tory mums fretting about food miles. Generation after generation, free traders struggle to make their case. The extraordinary thing is that they ever convince people in large numbers, since they are necessarily addressing themselves to the riders rather than the elephants.